How To Use Purevpn On Windows – PureVPN Review – 2019

IntroductionHow To Use Purevpn On Windows

PureVPN has been providing VPN services because 2007 It’s not surprising that it currently maintains a lengthy list of features: 2,000+ self-managed servers across 180+ locations, a broad selection of protocols, torrent support, DNS and IPv6 leak security, a wise kill switch, five apparatus allowed and payment via Bitcoin should you need it. How To Use Purevpn On Windows

Unusual Extras comprise’split tunneling’ (you choose which traffic goes through the VPN, and which uses your ISP) and also the capacity to produce an instantaneous Wi-Fi VPN hotspot in your notebook, and connect more devices through that.

The Company provides dedicated programs for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and Linux, extensions for Chrome and Firefox, and much more downloads and tutorials that will assist you set it up on routers, Kodi, Android TV, Amazon’s Fire TV Stick and more.

PureVPN PureVPN subscription choices:

12 month program – $5.75 per month ($69 total cost)

The Monthly plan is average value at $11 (#8.40), however, the annual plan is only a monthly $2.99 (#2.30), a excellent thing.

This Drops into a monthly $1.32 (#1) should you pay for 5 decades upfront, a total of $79 (#61). The cost is really low, although we wouldn’t normally recommend registering for that long, you may think that it’s rewarding. Personal Internet Access offers a decent two-year plan for $2.91 (#2.24) a month, for instance, but that’s still $70 (#54) in complete, not much less. If you simply use PureVPN for two or three decades, you’re getting decent value.

The Company spoils this fantastic belief a little. Each program has a’last sold’ index which tells you if a person signed up, and typically it.

This is Presumably meant to show you the service is, but we’re not certain the amounts are genuine. We visited in different browsers, and refreshed the page a few times, and the’sold’ figures varied. They behave as though they’re chosen randomly, instead of corresponding to any real world events.

PureVPN does not advertise a trial. We dug deep and found a webpage for something called a’trial accounts’, but that is somewhat misleading. It’s actually only a commercial program in which you pay a non refundable $2.50 (#2) for 3 days of service.

A guarantee is for the Commercial plans, which is more generous than most. PureVPN’s refund policy utilized to include some sneaky circumstances where you wouldn’t get your money back in the event that you’d connected over a hundred times, or used more than 3GB of data transfer, but we’re pleased to see these have been dropped. It’s currently promoted as a’no questions asked, secure, stress-free’ money-back guarantee, so if you’re unhappy, just send an email and ask for a refund. How To Use Purevpn On Windows

Programs

Handing Over your money to PureVPN is remarkably simple, since the business supports more or less every single payment format there is: credit card, PayPal, Bitcoin and many other cryptocurrencies (through CoinPayments), AliPay, assorted gift cards, and over 150 other payment methods via the Paymentwall platform.

After Parting with your cash, download links point one to apps for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android, the browser extensions and more. We grabbed the Windows customer, and as it had been downloading, a email arrived with login information.

Setup Was simple, and after a speedy launch, the Windows customer prompted us to select one of five modes: Stream, Internet Freedom, Security/Privacy, File Sharing and Dedicated IP. We guess most people will wonder if to select Security/Privacy or even Internet Freedom, and there’s no advice.

The Support site told us that selecting a mode would optimize PureVPN’s preferences . Choosing Security/Privacy would prioritize security but the Streaming and File Sharing modes would optimize for speed.

VPN Beginners might appreciate this strategy as it means they do not have to understand and tweak the preferences. As there’s no indication of what each mode does but experts are inclined to approve. There is nothing wrong with task-based mode choice, but we’d like a clear display of those settings that are unsuitable for each mode, so experienced users can understand the effects of their selection.

After You’re in a position to select locations. This has plenty of performance, enabling you to navigate locations by cities or countries, search by name, see ping times, or make favorites for speedy recall later.

Alternatively, Choosing a Goal option displays a list of tasks you might want to carry out — unblocking Netflix or other streaming sites, utilizing VoIP, accessing social media websites or whatever — and also you can in theory select among these, and permit PureVPN to choose a server for you.

Connect To the client and a host displays your connection status. There’s also an optional bandwidth graph showing your data transfers. You almost certainly won’t want it, but it’s excellent to see PureVPN making the effort.

The Client makes clever of usage of notifications to be certain that you know what is happening. Choose a place and as long as your Windows client is the foreground program, it won’t waste your time with desktop notifications. But if you change to the customer notices a different program, and a pop-up window seems to let you know when it disconnects and connects.

A bonus Characteristic blocks access to known sites. We’d always like to buy this type of attribute from a specialist security firm, but Gravity is a lot smarter than the majority of the VPN-related competition. In addition to blocking dangerous links, it can turn on Safe Search for the primary search engines, block entire categories of website, whitelist sites you always want to access, and blacklist sites you don’t. Oh, and it may block advertisements . How To Use Purevpn On Windows

The Settings Box is a highlight, particularly for users, since it filled with extras.

The Client does have choices to start as an example, on system start and auto-connect. It can open your default browser once you’re protected.

Need a Different protocol? PureVPN allows you to Pick from OpenVPN TCP/UDP, PPTP, L2TP, SSTP and IKEV. There’s also an Automatic alternative that the client suggests offers the very best speed and security, but from what we could see, that’s not true: it just cycles through another protocols till it finds one that works.

Split Tunneling permits you to send just specified apps’ visitors by your VPN. That takes more time to set up, and you have to be very sure which programs you want to redirect, but it can also optimize performance by restricting your data transfer needs.

The VPN Hotspot is an extra, configuring a hotspot which turns the server computer to a restricted VPN router. Once it is enabled, you’ll have the ability to use your phone, tablet or other devices to go online through the host’s PureVPN connection.

Along with the List goes on, with IPv6 leak security, a remarkably configurable kill button, along with a multi-port alternative which intelligently chooses the best port, avoiding any closed or throttled options. You can elect to use a non-NAT network to acquire a special IP address, port forwarding is available if you need it, and a Support department does not only link to the website: it facilitates creating a support ticket from within the customer.

Although There is lots of power , the interface is a clumsy and inconsistent mess. There are standard buttons, radio buttons, icons, links and sidebars, they don’t always work as you would expect, and although we figured out how to navigate around the system, it never felt comfortable or natural.

Still, The customer did a decent job for us, blocking DNS and WebRTC leaks, with the kill switch successfully killing our net access if the VPN link fell. If you’ll use a number of the client extra features, it might appeal.

We took a Look at PureVPN’s Android app, and it had been much the same story since the Windows version. After picking a’Mode’ (still not certain why), we were able to select cities, states, or choose a Goal (optimized for China, unblock this or that streaming assistance, etc ). It is more awkward to use than the average VPN app, but you’ll find it out easily enough.

What’s Intriguing is the Android program does not drop the majority of the settings and options, which is exactly what we see of the desktop. It’s a very similar feature set, such as a choice of protocol (OpenVPN TCP/UDP or IKEv2), a kill button, split tunneling, port forwarding, Gravity URL filtering, and more. If you’ll utilize all that functionality or some, it’s well worth a try. How To Use Purevpn On Windows

Privacy and logging

In a Previous reviewwe pointed out that PureVPN made a huge deal of its’zero log’ policy, explaining that this meant the firm didn’t record exactly what you did on the internet. Nevertheless, the small print stated there was some session logging, which appeared to add time you connect to a host, your incoming IP address and the total bandwidth used.

This Isn’t a detail. In October 2017 reports appeared of a man being detained on suspicion of running”a comprehensive cyberstalking effort”, in part based on PureVPN records showing that its services were obtained from originating IPs including the accused man’s home and workplace. The’zero log’ VPN retained some sort of logs, after all, and these were able to help link internet activities to a specific account.

PureVPN Type of responded in a blog to this Post, in which the firm pointed out that it did not keep full logs, such as your surfing history, and it had not done anything to violate its privacy policy, in which the session logging was mentioned.

This Does not address the dilemma of the firm described itself as maintaining’zero logs’ at the main portion of the website, however, when this turned out to not be completely true. That’s also not a trivial point. Logging policies are predicated almost entirely on trust, along with a VPN is not inclined to be reliable if it’s seen to mislead consumers or bury the fact of a scenario in the small print.

PureVPN has updated its privacy Policy, which currently includes probably the most explicit no-logging sentence we have ever observed:’we don’t retain any record of your browsing activities, connection logs, records of this VPN IPs assigned to you, your initial IPs, your connection time, the background of your browsing, the websites you visited, your incoming traffic, the content or information you’ve accessed, or the DNS queries generated by you personally.’

The Policy also clarifies the minimal link data it does report –‘We all know the day that you connected to a specific VPN location and from which Internet Service Provider’ — and covers lots of other important issues in a clear and readable manner.

The good news, then, is that PureVPN’s present Privacy policy looks great and says all the ideal things. It is much better than most of the contest. But the catch is that the previous logging narrative will lead some folks to question whether they could trust what the company says. We can not tell you what to think, but it is well worth checking out both PureVPN’s unique site defense and also its present privacy policy before you make your mind up.

Netflix

PureVPN Creates more of an attempt to support site unblocking than almost all of the competition. The company doesn’t only make airy claims on the site then forget about them later, it features special support for streaming within its apps, in theory allowing you to access Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, BBC iPlayer and a host of different services from where you are on the planet. How To Use Purevpn On Windows

We Double-clicked that the BBC choice, and viewed as the client connected and displayed a’err-network-changed’ message. What? This seemed like a severe problem, however, the browser had just detected the change in our community settings as the customer connected, and after this was complete, the BBC iPlayer site opened and streamed content as normal.

It was Much the same story with Netflix. The client started our browser before the link was complete, so we saw the same error message, but that vanished automatically, and we were free to browse and stream whatever Netflix content we enjoyed.

You’re Not limited to the professional services built into PureVPN’s apps, naturally. Linking to a US server got us in, although youTube was not contained for example.

Performance

Our Performance tests involve running custom software which connects checking much more , ping time, location and speeds. Regrettably, we couldn’t get this working with PureVPN, or determine why (whether that is our fault or theirs, we can’t be sure).

But An warning in the small print explains that consumers aren’t allowed to have more than 200 sessions every day When we did. That will not concern most folks, but it will become an issue when you’re running VPN benchmarks. How To Use Purevpn On Windows

We fell Back on our old manual way of connecting via clients and checking the results from several speed checking websites, such as SpeedTest.net, Fast.com and TestMy.net. This will not provide us to work with, but there’s still enough to get a sense for what the service can provide.

Our neighborhood UK servers varied a little more than usual, but nevertheless gave quite acceptable speeds of connection that was 75Mbps to us.

Close Rates were mildly under average. Netherlands connections can deliver substantially the same rates for us as UK servers, but they have been typically 35-45Mbps.

US Performance ranged from around 30Mbps to 50Mbps, in the west shore about the east. That is far from the fastest we’ve seen, but unless you are planning 24 hours of intensive torrenting, it is probably not likely to cause you any difficulties.

As usual, Speeds tailed off radically for the places that were more distant or less typical. By way of example, New Zealand averaged 12Mbps, Vietnam was 10Mbps, Taiwan hardly reached 1Mbps, and China ranged from 3Mbps down to such a speed the web often stalled mid-test. That places the size of PureVPN’s system into perspective (having heaps of servers does not matter if they’re unusably slow), but if you are only planning to use the significant places, it won’t matter very much.

On a few Occasions, our PureVPN Windows customer was not able to connect to our test server that is preferred. The Cancel button did not work, but the issue here is that the connection didn’t time out for several moments, although that is not uncommon.

What You Need To Know About PureVPN

The Evaluation of Speed — How Quick is PureVPN?

Let’s start off by making something clear, i.e. whatever VPN support you use, the internet speed is going to take a hit. That hit is a result. The huge majority of VPN services make every attempt. Unlike what many people are going to have you think like using dial-up it’s not going to be.

PureVPN, when compared to other comparable VPN services, appears to be much faster. Thus, yes it will live up to the claim of being the quickest in the business. How To Use Purevpn On Windows

How we compared and tested the operation was by utilizing Ookala’s nifty speed testing site and app. We ran the speed test on both global and domestic servers. We compared the outcomes and that is how we found PureVPN to be faster.

PureVPN includes a domestic latency of a mere 6.7percent percent. During our tests that were downloading, as a matter of fact, PureVPN improved rates which by our calculations is an unbelievable 346% percent. We found that rival VPN services were substantially slower. Some individuals suspect were throttling download speeds perhaps because they didn’t want to stress their servers out.

Once it comes to uploads, PureVPN did not really boost it did with downloads, but it required a mere 4.5percent percent hit. If anything this is among the very best scores we have seen from a VPN provider.

Throughout our global speed tests, the latency increased by 200%. Though download rates have been still a whopping 403.8percent percent better than any of the competing products I tested it against. The uploads have been 22.7% percentage slower which is second best compared to possibly Hotspot Shield which enhanced the upload speed by 1.4% percent.

A Mind-Blowing Number of Servers

The map on the left lets you bypass the program’s default recommendation and choose a server for yourself. Remember that by default PureVPN chooses the server which is the nearest one. When in China I noticed that it kept picking up servers in Hong Kong by default which is not simply nearby but also the fact that the cyberspace of Hong Kong is much less rigorously censored as mainland China.

PureVPN has over 2000 servers which are spread across 140 countries and 180 areas around the world. Servers are located in South America, Central America, Asia, North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. You may believe that PureVPN just has servers in countries which block or perhaps don’t censor websites, but you would be wrong. Servers in Russia, Turkey, and China are there in case you needed them.

It Does Not Slow Down Your Online

Over the years VPN providers, in general, have received bad press for notoriously slowing down net rates that users have not been happy with clearly. There are many VPN services that slow down everything might be net that is already slow. Fortunately, with PureVPN that is not the case even in the event that you use it to flow Netflix, YouTube, etc..

In addition to not slowing down your internet, PureVPN supplies a number of other features like robust servers which are located around the globe and which scored tremendously during our rate tests. Then there’s also the simple fact that they use encryption, together with apps for iOS and Android devices. Even though there are more reasons to think about PureVPN as we will examine in detail below. How To Use Purevpn On Windows

Excellent Collection of Features and straightforward

I’ve used dozens of VPN programs through the years, also PureVPN is like a breath of fresh air. It is easy to use and in relation to the last time that I used the app its geared towards people who are new to using VPNs. As soon as PureVPN loads you are prompted to choose from five choices, i.e. Security, Internet Freedom, Stream, Remote/Dedi IP (this feature offers you a dedicated IP) and File Sharing. An experience that is based on the option selected is then delivered by the app.

Another thing I like about PureVPN is that all the features are to the stage. For example, their Web Freedom feature lets you choose what area you need to get Netflix out of, like from the united kingdom, Australia, etc.. Netflix can be also accessed by you in which it’s otherwise blocked.

In comparison with the last time I used PureVPN now around it sensed zippier. The interface has been glowing, with vibrant pictures some of which may be hard to read on a screen. You’ll see the current IP address, link status, and the length of your session once you’re connected to a private server.

The traffic chart gives you a good feel for how much bandwidth is being absorbed, which is useful for anyone on a metered internet connection. But it is very important to mention here worrying about information caps which PureVPN doesn’t have any. Thus, you’re only limited to what the ISP has in store for you!

Like many other competing VPN providers, you choose the server and the country it’s based in. You may search for servers and click on them to link. Apparently, some servers based on which you are located are likely to be quicker than others because of latency.

You can also choose which protocols to use. Pick between OpenVPN, IKEv2, SSTP, PPTP, and L2TP. Then there is PureVPN’s very own stealth protocol which according to the company ensures the anonymity. Since folks like me have PureVPN makes it simple by giving a rate and safety rating for every. The important thing to note here is because the security boosts the speed slows down. So, you’ll need to hit a compromise between both depending on what is needed. By default, a protocol it thinks best for you is chosen by the program. Most people who do not work for the CIA (pun intended) will be fine with the default alternative. How To Use Purevpn On Windows

Hands-on and First Impressions

We have admittedly used PureVPN earlier, but after a hiatus or perhaps two years we pretty much forgot how things worked. Select a password and you’ll have to put in your email once you’ve decided to subscribe and download their software. Interestingly and perhaps confusingly, this is not what you’ll use to log-in into the software, but it’s used for billing purposes.

Once subscribers have paid, they receive an email with the username and password in plain text. We have used other VPNs that use the exact same system to separate payment identities from user identities that guarantees anonymity. Nevertheless we think it could be confusing to first-time customers but. Additionally, in our experience the email tends to property on your spam folder for some reason, so be sure before calling support, to check that.

Customer Support

PureVPN includes a large support Website of tutorials and troubleshooting manuals. The opening page points you Setup Guide, Troubleshoot, For Users in China and to watch Netflix US, for instance, and most of these sections include more content than you would anticipate.

The Setup Guide includes subsections for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS, Smart TV, Routers and Devices, as an example, as well as some of those individual segments have more information than the support website of lesser VPNs.

We are, Though It’s an impressive amount of work Unsure how effective and reliable it may be. We checked the OpenVPN setup manual, for instance, and discovered it failed. OpenVPN was not installed properly, there weren’t any PureVPN configuration files, and there was no information in the manual to help us figure this out.

If the Site can’t help, you raise a support ticket from inside the customer or can send an email. We took the ticket route and the service done with the support team delivering a useful and friendly answer to our test question to us .

Alternatively, Live chat can be used by you . We discovered it might take a minute or two to receive a response, and even since we’d received to our email query, then, the agent did not provide us the level of help. PureVPN couldn’t get close to the degree of service we’d obtained from opponents like ExpressVPN, then, but we are still glad the choice is available. With speedy service to hand, any chat issues you might have probably aren’t too significant. How To Use Purevpn On Windows

Final verdict

PureVPN Comes bundled with a pile. These don’t always work as you may anticipate and there are lots of usability issues with the programs — but demanding users who will use this level of VPN power must provide PureVPN a look.